Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 (Saturn) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
157A playthrough of Williams' 1996 versus fighting game for the Sega Saturn, Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3.
Played through the Master tower path with Kung Lao on the normal difficulty level.
UMK3 for the Saturn is a great port of a good game in the Mortal Kombat canon series. It has most of the stuff from the arcade version intact, and it looks and sounds quite good. It's based on the PS1/Windows 95 version of Mortal Kombat 3 (which was a phenomenally good port - effectively perfect besides the load times) - the Saturn, however never received a copy of Mortal Kombat 3 like just about every other system in existence did. Sony wanted 32-bit exclusivity enough that (according to Wiki) they paid $12M back in 1995 for timed-exclusivity. It didn't really matter for too long, though, since the Saturn got both MK Trilogy and UMK3. Opinions tend to be mixed about which - MKT or UMK3 - is the better title, and there really isn't a definitive answer. Trilogy was pretty much everything that MK was so far at that point in time thrown all together. It was totally imbalanced and fairly glitchy, but it had *so* much content. UMK3 doesn't have quite as much, but still has a good sized (and far better balanced) character roster, and (at least in this version) has far fewer bugs that hamper the gameplay. They're both great and worth playing, and neither is terribly expensive if you want to try all of them - even if that's only an option if you own both a Saturn and a Playstation.
The graphics and sounds are quite faithful to the originals. They aren't quite perfect (a few sound effects are missing, but the voice and sound samples are of surprisingly high quality), but you'd generally be hard pressed to notice. The controls are right on - at least, as much as they were in the arcade version - the weird slipperiness and at-times idiosyncratic flailings can all be found on the Midway cab as well. And for me, it's held back by only two things: The first is the load times. They don't destroy the game, but they certainly slow it down - and God help you if player 2 wants to use Shang Tsung and morph a lot. The other issue is the difficulty posed by the game's AI. To be fair, it's not a problem specifically with the port. The Saturn version plays identically to the arcade one , and the issue lies with the original its based on. Funnily enough, this exact issue plagues all versions of Mortal Kombat Trilogy and Ultimate 3. It's beyond cheap. It's infuriating. I barely got through this on the normal difficulty mode without having to continue, and I'm still wondering a bit how I managed it.
The only advice I can offer is this: the AI won't play fair, so feel free to exploit the **** out of it. Figure out how you can lure certain enemies into patterns, and memorize a few fairly easy 5-10 hit combos and launch them constantly at the enemy: it's about the only way you can consistently do good damage. I'm sure you'll notice I spam Kung Lao's (HP,LP,HP,LP,LK,LK, Roundhouse to the head) heavy hitter a fair amount. You really have to know them well, too - if you hadn't noticed, this game plays extremely fast - much speedier than any other before it. It makes things fun for how hectic the fighting becomes, but it can be maddening at times when you get flattened because the game is too fast to be able to keep up with a series of inputs.
Oh well, those couple of things aside, my sister and I played Mortal Kombat a load as kids, and we loved it. I still love to play it, but like way back, it's far more fun with a friend. Friends don't usually play like the computer from the Minority Report would - like MK3's different versions did.
Also make sure to check out the video I made to go alongside this one - it is the montage of all of the match-ending movies (fatalities, babalities, animalities, friendships, et al) that you can win at the end of a playthrough. I've edited it up all nicely and cut out the loading times - you can see it here if you'd like: https://www.youtube.com/edit?o=U&video_id=fqYqE_tWQVk
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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